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The Duncan Sisters' Performances of Race and Gender Chapman University Chapman University Digital Commons Theatre Faculty Articles and Research Theatre 2011 The Angel and the Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances of Race and Gender Jocelyn Buckner Chapman University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/theatre_articles Part of the African American Studies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Theatre and Performance Studies Commons, Performance Studies Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social History Commons, Theatre History Commons, United States History Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Buckner, Jocelyn Louise. "The Angel and the Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances of Race and Gender." Popular Entertainment Studies 2.2 (2011): 55-72. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Theatre at Chapman University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theatre Faculty Articles and Research by an authorized administrator of Chapman University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Angel and the Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances of Race and Gender Comments This article was originally published in Popular Entertainment Studies, volume 2, issue 2, in 2011. Copyright The uthora This article is available at Chapman University Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/theatre_articles/5 55 Jocelyn L. Buckner University of Pittsburgh, US The Angel and the Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances of Race and Gender From the 1920s to the 1950s Vivian and Rosetta Duncan performed as the title characters of their Tom Show Topsy and Eva in front of thousands of audiences in the United States and abroad. This essay examines how the Duncan Sisters’ appropriation of blackness through their performance of black and white womanhood, and their approach to anarchistic comedy resulted in a particular attitude to age, gender, race, and sexuality that reinforced their privilege as white women, even while it pushed the boundaries of acceptable femininity in the swiftly shifting American culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Packaged as a night of physical, musical, and comedic theatrical entertainment, Topsy and Eva was distinct enough to make the Duncans a part of theatre history by becoming one of the longest running sister acts and Tom Shows of the American stage. Jocelyn L. Buckner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current book project foregrounds the sister act phenomenon in U.S. popular entertainment at the turn of the last century as a representative touchstone of American society’s increasing acceptance of female subjectivity in public, political, and artistic spheres. She has published extensively in American Studies Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey, and she is a former managing editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Key words: Appropriation, Blackface, Duncan Sisters, Gender, Race, Sexuality, Tom Shows, Topsy and Eva, Vaudeville, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Turn me up and turn me back, first I'm white, and then I'm black.1 opsy-Turvy dolls were popular toys for young children on plantations T in the antebellum South.2 One end of the doll resembled either an angelic white child wearing her best dress or a beautiful white mistress. When turned upside down, the doll revealed the face and costume of a young black female slave or a Mammy figure. These dolls remained popular into the mid- twentieth century, when patterns for the toy were mass produced by companies Popular Entertainment Studies, Vol. 2, Issue 2, pp. 55-72. ISSN 1837-9303 © 2011 The Author. Published by the School Of Drama, Fine Art and Music, Faculty of Education & Arts, The University of Newcastle, Australia. 56 including McCalls, Vogart, Redline, and Butterick. In the 1940s Redline and Vogart began selling patterns for the dolls under a new name: Topsy and Eva, the black slave girl and young white mistress, characters made famous in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.3 Renaming the doll was a nod to the enduring nature of this pair and their conflated ubiquity in American culture. Whether Topsy-Turvy or Topsy and Eva, as Valerie Borey notes, this doll possessed the ability to: emphasise the differences between the powerful and the powerless. For this reason, it is a doll uniquely able to detect and reflect cultural tensions as they changed with the times and economic conditions . the two- headed, reversible, upside-down doll is . a symbol of power, of resistance, of secrecy, and of revolution.”4 Rosetta and Vivian Duncan5 were a sister act noted for their long running portrayals of the title characters of the musical comedy Topsy and Eva, their spin on the Tom Show tradition.6 Like the Topsy and Eva doll, the Duncan Sisters’ routine capitalised on America’s appetite for racial humour, access to female bodies, and nostalgia for good old-fashioned minstrelsy. The Duncan Sisters have been largely ignored by performance historians, mentioned only in passing in the context of larger studies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or briefly chronicled in histories of vaudeville and popular culture. Yet the sisters are worthy of scholarly attention for the ways they capitalised on Eurocentric ideals about race and gender to leverage social status and power within America’s racist, sexist society. The Duncan Sisters’ performances and archive can be confrontational due to their racist and sexist content; however they form an important and under- recognised part of theatre history that continues to influence perceptions of race and gender in performance today. In this essay I examine archival evidence on the Duncans and Topsy and Eva to develop a history of their act, which remained popular for nearly forty years. “The black and white Duncans (sisters under the skin),”7 created a particular approach to age, gender, race, and sexuality, packaged as a rollicking night of physical, musical, and comedic theatrical entertainment. Their show was distinct enough to make them a part of theatre history by becoming one of the longest running sister acts and Tom Shows in the history of the American stage. This analysis contributes to theatre history by examining a largely forgotten but highly influential female comic pair, thereby expanding our awareness and understanding of the complexities of women’s participation in the development of American popular entertainment. The Duncan Sisters’ Early Career as “Ebullient Babes”8 The Duncan Sisters made their Broadway debut in Doing Our Bit in 1917, followed by featured roles in Tip Top (1920).9 They debuted Topsy and Eva in San Francisco in 1923 and performed in New York’s vaudeville seasons between 1923-1931, including performances with Florenz Ziegfield’s Midnight Frolic of 1929. Though a full-length biopic about them was discussed but ultimately never produced, they were nonetheless at the forefront of the development of Popular Entertainment Studies, Vol. 2, Issue 2, pp. 55-72. ISSN 1837-9303 © 2011 The Author. Published by the School Of Drama, Fine Art and Music, Faculty of Education & Arts, The University of Newcastle, Australia. 57 Hollywood cinema. They appeared in films including the silent feature Topsy and Eva in 1927 (directed by Del Lord with additional scenes by D.W. Griffith). They toured movie houses with the film and performed live before the screenings, which extended the popularity of their alter egos and the longevity of their careers. They were also featured in It’s a Great Life (1929), an early sound musical with short Technicolor sequences. The most important development of the Duncans’ early career was the creation of what I identify as their “infantile routine.” Extending beyond the parameters of a “kid act” in which one or more young performers presented a routine that emphasised their skill and professionalism as remarkable in the light of their youth, the infantile routine was an act that the Duncans maintained throughout their careers, despite their age. In these performances the sisters acted as “youths” in order to gain permission to behave badly, much to the delight of audiences in search of an escape from the confines of everyday social responsibilities and expectations. In figure 1 the twenty-something-year-old sisters are dressed in similar costumes, sporting oversized girlish bows in their similarly styled blonde coifs. They support opposite ends of a flower basket, gazing sweetly over its handle at the camera. They are the perfect picture of childlike innocence and sweetness, belying the mischievous characters, The Terrible Twins named Bad and Worse, that they actually played in Tip Top. Figure 1. Vivian and Rosetta Duncan in Tip Top (1920). ©Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Despite the freedom it afforded them, as this image demonstrates, the Duncans’ infantile routine did not celebrate independence or womanhood, but rather smothered them in fabricated prepubescent innocence. The sisters’ performances conflated women and children, furthering the ideology that women are child-like and frivolous, rather than mature and adult. The sisters’ characterisations simultaneously stripped them of any mature sexual appeal and exposed them (physically in ridiculously short, bloomer-bearing costumes and Popular Entertainment
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